Saturday, January 31, 2009

¡Viva la globalización!

Today a new HEB Mart opened in Missouri City, Texas, about 20 min. from my house. Over the years I've noticed an increasing number of American grocery stores have an "International Foods" aisle, with a small assortment of couscous, teriyaki sauce and basmati rice. However this gigantic supermarket, with a very ethnically diverse clientele, actually has 3-4 shelves just for products from South America!

I have been looking for ají, i.e. chili peppers from Peru used to season everything from rice to chicken to vegetables, ever since I got back from Peru. Today I was overjoyed to find them at last...

Hooray, or as they say in Peru, "ji ji... ra!"


"Ají Amarillo, Product of Peru"

Inca Kola, national soft drink of Peru...

Friday, January 23, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire and the Real "Street Kids"

Yesterday the Academy Award nominations were announced, and Slumdog Millionaire, the sleeper hit filmed in the slums of Mumbai, India, received 10 nominations. I never thought I'd see the day that a film about street kids - portrayed with both harsh realism and fairy-tale redemption - would become a mainstream hit.

Having known real "street kids", and kept in touch with some of them into adulthood (they too are on Facebook!), I loved the characters of Jamal and Latika, but did not find them entirely convincing. Jamal is wide-eyed and innocent, a pure soul, which is not what I've seen in kids who've been orphaned and on the streets since the age of seven. The movie makes a decent argument that his more wily brother has shielded and protected him for most of his life, but I doubt he could have shielded him entirely. The complete lack of sexual exploitation or drug use was also hard to believe, but their manipulation by ganglords using them to beg for money completely resonated with what I've seen and heard abroad. I hope those scenes will make Westerners traveling to 3rd world countries think twice before giving begging children money instead of food or clothing - you're essentially giving cash to gangsters.

The character that stood out for me the most is Salim, the older brother. A case could be made for him being either the hero or the villain of the story. He does some evil, heartless things, sometimes to protect himself and his brother, sometimes out of naked ambition, always in order to survive and climb the food chain. Something a gangster told him about being a big man has stuck with him since he was a little boy. With any semblance of a normal childhood removed, he has learned to operate on a different playing field. He is the most like the street kids I've come to know. Kids who've had terrible things done to them, and done terrible things to others, usually in that order. Kids who have become bad news, but on some level never forget the difference between right and wrong, between what was supposed to be and what happened instead. For all of his bad deeds, Salim makes sure Jamal is able to escape to a better life.

Some of the real kids I've met are brooding, depressed types, others brash and mischievous. Some are extremely needy for love and attention; others are suspicious and distant. Some have been able to hold down jobs since reaching adulthood, and others have not. All are human beings who've had to survive incredible circumstances, and deserve a chance to have their stories told.

a young Jamal still believes that life is beautiful

Friday, January 09, 2009

An Atheist's Perspective on Missionaries

Some of my friends have asked me, based on my personal experience, whether missionaries in Peru or other parts of the world are seen as imposing their Western Christian values on other parts of the world. While there is no doubt that this has happened in the past, and in some cases continues in the present, I have found in my personal experience in Mexico, Peru & Kenya, the reputation of Christian missionaries is often the opposite; when I told people I was a Christian or a missionary, they would usually brighten, open up, even increase their trust in me. I know in Latin America and other regions that are rife with corrupt institutions, the church and its representatives are more likely than gov't or private sectors to care for the poor, provide basic services like schools and clinics, and to treat people of low social standing as "brothers" and equals.

Here's a fascinating article written by a self-professed atheist, which speaks to the profound sense of empowerment and liberation that Christian theology can bring to the disenfranchised.

***

December 27, 2008
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

by Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.